Peek-a-boo! Now you see it. Now you don't.
Yesterday Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) posted an essay on the evils of Halloween but today, it's no longer there. Kimberly Daniels, the eponymous founder of Kimberly Daniels Ministries International, had written a blog entitled The Danger of Celebrating Halloween which CBN featured, briefly, on their own website. Here's a little of what Rev. Kimberly had to say about Halloween:

The rest of the article is here. I particularly like the part where she states that candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches (not to mention the sex with demons stuff!).

Artist crucifies an ape and electrocutes a black Jesus.
There's a new cross on display at the old Holy Trinity Church at Marylebone in the heart of London but the figure dangling from it isn't Jesus; it's a gorilla. Actually, it's a sculpture; one of 60 pieces in an exhibit called The Age of the Marvelous. And the church isn't a church either; at least, not any more. Built in 1825, the former Holy Trinity Church is now One Marylebone, a conference center catering to meetings, events and exhibits, large and small.

The very life-like gorilla on a cross was created by artist Paul Fryer with the help of a former Madame Tussauds waxworks expert. The piece is entitled The Privilege of Dominion and is intended to highlight the plight of the Western Lowland Gorilla as well as to challenge the idea that animals have no souls. The artist insists that he didn't intend to offend Christians.

The artist also defended his other work in the exhibit, a Pieta-like sculpture of an electrocuted black Jesus, by saying it was intended it was intended to challenge people's notions of race and religion.

Susan Sackett, author of the controversial tell-all, Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry and four other Star Trek books will be giving a talk entitled Atheism in Star Trek at the general meeting of Atheists United, a Los Angeles-based freethought group. It will take place Sunday, Oct. 25th at 11 a.m. at the Center for Inquiry West, in Hollywood. The event is free and open to the general public.
More here.

About the "collagen-injected lips and silicon-injected boobs": Nope. She did not look at all artificially pneumatic, and was very attractive. However, she was also very, very young (early 20s at the latest); she also had several piercings and tattoos.

The great ballroom was packed with people waiting for the arrival of Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher. Their appearance would signal that the culminating event of the first day of the 2009 AAI convention was about to begin and the air was electric with anticipation. Most of the crowd had been there for hours, first enjoying cocktails at a reception and, later, watching a live, streaming video of Real Time with Bill Maher where Dawkins was appearing as a guest. Then, while everyone waited for them to make the short drive from the TV studio to the convention center (both were in Burbank), entertainment was provided by Brian Dalton, better known as Mr. Deity, whose humorous skits on YouTube have a worldwide following.
...the show was interrupted for a couple minutes by cheers and applause as they made their way to their table. Bill Maher was accompanied by a beautiful young woman -or so several people told me. I was seated too far away to tell (a dissenting opinion came from a female atheist I spoke with. "Beautiful? Hmpf!" she said. "Only if you like collagen-injected lips and silicon-injected boobs!" I mention her assertions only in the interest of completeness. As a critical thinker, I cannot vouch for a hypothesis that I'm unable to personally test... darn it!).